van der Hoop on Ne

If intuition is combined with an extroverted attitude, then the individual will form intuitive judgments of what goes on in the outer world and will be apt suddenly to discover connections between things without being able to explain them in a very elaborated manner. Extroverted intuitive perceptions and the actions and expressions resulting from them are sometimes surprisingly justified later on by events or by an indirect process of reasoning.

While sensation is chiefly concerned with the empirical actuality of things, intuition sees what is of noetic and ideational importance. Intuition is especially acute in discovering all the various possibilities of ideational development and activity. Even in cases where intuition is not the leading function, it is often capable of finding a solution where no other function could succeed.

Jung writes of intuition that if it predominates, all the ordinary circumstances of life seem to be enclosures out of which intuition must find a way. It is often seeking for new paths and new developments of life in an outward direction; all circumstances soon appear to the intuitive mind as a prison or as an oppression, which causes a longing for liberation.

Things in the outer world seem at times to acquire an exaggerated value when they can be made use of for the purpose of a solution, liberation, or the discovery of new possibilities. But as soon as they have served as a bridge or ladder, they seem to have lost all value and are cast aside as unnecessary lumber. A fact is only valued insofar as it may contain new potentialities that may outgrow the original fact and serve, in turn, to liberate the individual.

Possibilities that arise suddenly become compelling motives to the intuitive mind, and it will sacrifice for them everything else. In contrast with the advantages of this rich variety of possible activities, we find the disadvantages of such qualities as changeableness, fickleness, and lack of harmony.